How Covid started is one debate. Whether it came from a lab, a wet market or somewhere else is something people can argue over. Whether governments got every decision right is another debate entirely.
But claiming Covid wasn’t real, or that it wasn’t a serious disease, is absolute horseshit.
I lost my father to Covid. He went out once during the Christmas 2020 period to put petrol in the car and caught it. He was 72, nearly 73. He’d had a mini-stroke years earlier, had high blood pressure and was diabetic. The reality is that a bad bout of flu might well have killed him too, but he’d been vaccinated against flu. Covid was what he caught, Covid pneumonia was what took him.
One of the first things they did was discuss a do-not-resuscitate decision with him. In the conversation I had with the consultant on the Thursday, they explained that, despite the fact he was up, talking and actually seemed more lucid than he had been in the days leading up to his admission, they fully expected him to be in a significantly worse condition by the Saturday morning. He was.
I’ve had Covid myself. It left me with long Covid and damage to part of my lungs. Before that, I’d always had a strong immune system.
And just to be clear, I wasn’t someone who blindly supported every lockdown measure either.
I think the first lockdown was probably necessary because nobody really knew what we were dealing with. After that, I think the focus should have shifted towards controlling the spread, protecting the vulnerable and allowing people to make sensible decisions, rather than repeatedly trying to lock down an entire population. If a virus spreads through people mixing, there was always going to come a point where many people would catch it regardless. You can’t realistically keep a whole country locked down forever.
I also remember driving through Leicester in June 2020. At the time there were constant reports about the city being hit particularly hard and facing additional restrictions and that it was so unfair due to the ethnic makeup and reliance on family mixing in those communities.
As I drove through, I personally saw very little evidence of social distancing in the areas I passed through. That was my own observation, and it reinforced to me just how difficult it was going to be to contain a virus if large numbers of people continued to mix normally.
Then the reports were those communities were being hit harder and the Government needed to do more.
To me, that sums up the impossible position governments were in. If they imposed restrictions, they were accused of authoritarianism or discrimination. If they didn’t, they were accused of negligence. Whatever they chose, they were going to be criticised. They were, in many respects, damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.
But the thing that has stayed with me wasn’t losing my dad. 72 is a shame, not a tradgedy.
In the room next to him was a 26-year-old woman who had given birth to twins only six months earlier. At three o’clock in the morning, I watched her being wheeled up to intensive care. That image was a killer.
She did survive, thankfully, but her recovery was a hard one.
So by all means we should debate where Covid came from. Debate lockdowns. Debate masks. Debate vaccines. Debate what governments should or shouldn’t have done differently. Those are all legitimate discussions.
But to say Covid wasn’t real, or that it was just a bad cold, or that it only affected people who were about to die anyway is bollocks.
England
